


Once More Unto The Fade

by CypressSunn



Series: One Hundred and One Shots [2]
Category: BioShock Infinite
Genre: Gen, Post-Canon, Vignette
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-25
Updated: 2016-02-25
Packaged: 2018-05-23 03:11:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 400
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6102909
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CypressSunn/pseuds/CypressSunn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>redemption wasn't a clean business in the end.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Once More Unto The Fade

somewhere, somewhen, far, far beyond the infinite infinities, there is a man without a city. a man without a lighthouse. you've met him before and you've met him after. you know his names- all of them, the ones he calls himself and the ones he does not. (booker, zachary, pinkerton, prophet, deWitt, husband, hale, father, traitor, martyr, sioux, comstock-)

though the only name he's interested in is one you no longer call yourself. anna.

but this him, this man you've found here, waiting at the end of all things: he is the amalgamation of every door slamming shut. the coalescing image of every mirror turning face. still unshaven. still taciturn. countenance still as dark as ale, or a fading whiff of tobacco. the only thing new, the only thing different, is the clothes he wears. somehow soaked dry and dripping brackish water, his soul disheveled with river mud. a man submerged, laid up upon a riverbed, never again to rise.

redemption wasn't a clean business in the end. you know this. bits of yourselves are still lost at sea, after all.

you wonder briefly if that's what's happened here. if perhaps what was left of him had found what was left of you through such a conduit. through the water, through the tides. from the river and out over open water under the guide of a lighthouse where you had kept the fire burning low. or perhaps you burned it higher. you had no fear of being found by anything else.

there is no one else, here at the end you, at the end of you both. because there is always a lighthouse until suddenly there isn't. the keeper is gone. the doors are sealing and all behind them is lost. he takes your hand and you take his. the circle is broken and unbroken. the choice has been made and unmade. columbia has fallen. the rapture dream is over. and paris-

 _"No_." he tells you. it is all he tells you.

and you... you understand that this is your final chance to understand. that you are here. that you are now. and so is he. 

behind you, the lights are dimming. fading beyond reach. fading beyond redemption of gods or kings or men. a curtain drawn over a final embrace, over the faintest glow of an extinguished cigarette, over the chimes of a birdcage door closing one last time.

**Author's Note:**

> Written for my 101 Prompts challenge, #58: Fade


End file.
